Facebook Reawakens The Lactivist Monster

There are few people easier to offend than the “lactivists.” These are the breastfeeding moms who think that breastfeeding is akin to something holy and sacred, and get outrageously outraged if you mention that formula-feeding is just as good as breastfeeding — and even more so if they aren’t allowed to breastfeed anytime, anywhere they wish. Every so often there will be a story in the news about some hapless manager of a restaurant or a store asking a breastfeeding mom to cover up. The lactivists promptly descend upon said establishment to show their “right” to breastfeed in public and show their boobs to the entire world. The latest target of lactivist rage is Facebook, for daring to limit how much boob can be shown in breastfeeding photos.

The Facebook breastfeeding controversy is nothing new. For three years now, lactivist moms have been complaining that Facebook has been pulling photos of moms breastfeeding their babies. Time magazine, however, posted an article a week ago fanning the flames, spotlighting a mother who has had her account suspended four times.

In one of the photos that keeps getting Emma Kwasnica’s Facebook account suspended, the Montreal-based mother and breast-feeding activist is tandem nursing, with a newborn at one breast and a two-year-old at the other. Classical art and public health be damned, Facebook has censored countless breast-feeding photos for violating the company’s terms of use, a policy that has inspired more than 250,000 people to join a Facebook group called “Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding Is Not Obscene!” Kwasnica has protested her four account suspensions by e-mailing administrators and keeps doggedly reposting photographs and organizing virtual “nurse-ins” via her Facebook group, Informed Choice: Birth and Beyond.

The Facebook group mentioned above, arguing that breastfeeding isn’t obscene, would like you to believe that the nasty people who run Facebook are just breastfeeding haters who are looking for an opportunity to promote bottle-fed babies over breastfed infants. Hey, what’s a good protest without a little conspiracy thrown in for good measure, right?

Recently, Facebook has started ‘pulling a myspace’ by not allowing people to post profile pictures of babies nursing. The pictures have been reported as ‘obscene’ and have been removed- their posters warned not to repost or fear being kicked off of Facebook.

We’re wondering: what about a baby breastfeeding is obscene? Especially in comparison to MANY other pictures posted all over Facebook that really are obscene.

Facebook, we expect more from you, and we expect you to realize that nursing moms everywhere have a right to show pictures of their babies eating, just like bottle-fed babies have a right to be seen. In an effort to appease the closed-minded, you are only serving to be detrimental to babies, women, and society.

So does Facebook really have a secret anti-breastfeeding agenda? Uh, not so much.